WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 20, 2000 - Clickshare Service Corp., the first digital content exchange for Internet purchasing, today announced the closing of a pre-seed $500,000 "angel" financing round. The investors include David Duffield, founder and chairman of PeopleSoft, Inc., plus other private and institutional investors.

"We are enormously fortunate to have assembled a core group of smart-money investors as we take the Clickshare exchange service into beta testing," said James B. Shaffer, Clickshare CEO. "Our goal is to become the ubiquitous exchange for digital content. Clickshare will make it easier for proprietors and consumers of digital content to do business with each other in a privacy-protected environment, like bringing the Swiss bank account concept to cyberspace."

Joining Duffield in Clickshare's Series A Preferred round are Margaret L. Taylor, CEO of Venture Builders; 25-year software veteran Michael Kaiser, who has served with Andersen Consulting and more recently a PeopleSoft development executive; and Sam S. McKeel, retired publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Sun-Times.

With roots in the publishing industry, Clickshare was established in anticipation of the explosion of the market for digital content, ranging from music to books, newspaper articles to streaming video. Early Clickshare investors included Thomas J. Rehwaldt, a co-founder of The Chicago Reader and Washington, D.C., City Paper.

Until joining Clickshare in October, Shaffer was chief executive of Guy Gannett Communications, Inc., of Portland, Maine, a diversified media holding company with television, newspaper, direct marketing and Internet operations in seven states. Earlier he was CFO of The Los Angeles Times and executive VP of The Sun Times Co. of Chicago.

Among Clickshare's directors is Steve Mott, a former MasterCard executive who oversaw the credit-card giant's early e-commerce efforts and who is now an executive with Priceline.COM's WebHouse Club affiliate. Other directors come from the computer hardware, academic and publishing fields.

Clickshare said the funds would be used for market development and for technology buildout with early-stage partners. With several alliances and trials already in various stages of completion, Shaffer said Clickshare would be available full-scale next year, when additional partners are assembled in key market areas.

"Clickshare solves three problems at once," said Shaffer. "First, many content sites are drowning in red ink because of the limitations of advertising revenue. Second, many sites with great 'eyeball' traffic are challenged to monetize their user relationships before they run out of money. And, lastly, some great content is being held off the Internet for lack of satisfactory packaging and revenue models."

Shaffer said that Clickshare's mission is "to facilitate one-click sharing of digital content and users among content owners and 'infomediaries'." "What we do, that no one else does, is enable 'behind-the-scenes' wholesale/retail and other value-added relationships in digital content marketing."

The Clickshare Service includes payment aggregation, audience measurement, site-access control, personalization and privacy-protected demographic management. It provides portals and other proprietors with built-in customer bases, such as ISPs, wireless carriers, banks, and affinity groups with a way to strengthen and monetize their bond with customers. Clickshare offers consumers a way to have an account at one web site, yet buy content from many other websites -- without having to pass around a credit card number, fill out forms or give up personal information.

Clickshare has alliances with Red Hat Software Inc., Comtex News Corp. and Tristar Technologies (Proprietary) Ltd. of South Africa. In the last year, Clickshare has tested the sale of information provided by The Associated Press, PR Newswire, Business Wire, Xinhua, Itar-Tass, M2 Communications, U.S. Newswire, and The Sports Network. Clickshare is also researching the sale of digital coursepacks with text excerpts provided by publishers including Congressional Quarterly Press, West Publishing Co. and Johns Hopkins University Press.

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